He awoke to a noise in the middle of the night. Was it coming from inside his San Jose home? The back patio? Bijan Moeinzadeh couldn't tell. But his instincts immediately kicked in: He grabbed the .357 revolver from a lockbox in his bedroom and slipped it in his pocket.

Inching toward the noise, he discovered a stranger riffling through belongings on his porch. The patio light and a shout scared off the intruder. The gun never left Moeinzadeh's pocket, but the Navy medic who recently returned from Afghanistan -- and who learned to shoot as a Boy Scout and often practices at a San Jose firing range -- said he felt safer for having it.

"If I felt I was under threat," Moeinzadeh, 25, said of that encounter a few years ago, "I could have gone for it."

With the country embroiled in a polarizing debate over gun control after a series of mass shootings, many gun supporters passionately argue that arming the "good guys" makes us safer. But a pair of recent Bay Area cases where "good guys" drew guns to defend themselves shows how dangerous -- and unpredictable -- that can be. Just the act of drawing a gun, experts say, can turn a violent encounter into a deadly one.

In San Jose on the morning of Dec. 31, maintenance worker Luis Ricardo Hernandez told police he was just trying to help his supervisor perform a citizen's arrest when a man the boss believed was a serial burglar drove into the San Jose apartment complex garage. But now Hernandez, 26, faces second-degree murder charges after shooting the man when he wrestled loose and began to flee.

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In Pittsburg last week, a resident grabbed his gun and confronted an intruder who brandished what turned out to be a toy gun. During a scuffle, both guns dropped, but the resident reached for a knife and stabbed the burglar to death in what police say was self-defense.

And in another dramatic story making national headlines, a Georgia woman, hiding in the attic with her 9-year-old twins, fired five shots into an intruder who still managed to flee.

While cases like these galvanize the gun rights community, experts say they also show how perilous it can be when split-second decisions are made in hair-raising moments with guns at the ready. Last year's infamous shooting of black teen Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida showed just that.

"When people hear self-defense gun use, they think it's clearly a bad guy versus clearly a good guy and that's not what most of these stories are like," said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Often, he said, drawing guns ostensibly for self-defense actually escalates gun violence that otherwise might have ended more peacefully or safely.

While gun owners say "arming the good guys" is all about self-protection, the mere presence of a gun in a household can have dire consequences.

"After 45 years in law enforcement, I've had a lot more calls where a gun was misused, obtained by a child, used in the heat of a domestic dispute -- a lot more of those calls than of a homeowner defending themselves," said Craig Steckler, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police who retired as Fremont's police chief last month. "When you balance it all out, the minuses of having a gun, on the precept that you're going to defend yourself, outweigh the pluses."

Extensive and reliable statistics about gun violence are difficult to come by, experts say, in part because of pressure from the National Rifle Association in the mid-1990s that led to reductions in funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had been tracking gun violence data.

"We need solid science to help us determine what we need to do," said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program.

Wintemute is one of some 20 gun policy experts who will be meeting Monday and Tuesday at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore to recommend federal actions to reduce gun violence across the country -- from mass killings like the ones in Newtown, Conn., to more common gun violence.

News of mass shootings, self-defense incidents and potential new gun control measures has fueled gun sales -- more than 19 million background checks were conducted in 2012 alone -- even as federal statistics show violent crime has declined dramatically over recent decades.

Those who say firearms are an effective means of self-defense often point to "More Guns, Less Crime," a 1998 book by economist and gun-rights advocate John Lott, who argues violent crime rates decrease when states ease their laws allowing concealed handguns.

But Stanford University law professor John Donohue III wrote in 2003 that Lott's "statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic and extraordinarily fragile," and that "there is stronger evidence for the conclusion that these laws increase crime than there is for the conclusion that they decrease it." That remains true today, Donohue said.

"You can anecdotally find circumstances in which having a gun was helpful," he said. "But having a gun is a little like having a chest X-ray: If you have lung cancer, a chest X-ray can save your life, but if you have a chest X-ray every day, it can kill you."

Nancy Lanza's son, Adam, used her own legally owned firearms to kill her before he went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Donohue noted.

"Unless you have a very strong reason for thinking you're a target," he said, "I think you'd probably be safer not having a gun."

At Field Sports Park, a county-owned shooting range in San Jose, a picture of John Wayne with a rifle slung over his shoulder is taped to a window. Targets are bull's-eyes, not human silhouettes, and many of the marksmen and -women say they practice shooting as a hobby with no intention of ever using their guns against people.

"But what if there's a need and you're not equipped?" asked Rick Doran, 54, a Ben Lomond resident who works in the swimming pool business.

Janice Houser, 55, of Cupertino, said she feels safer knowing she has a gun at home. Still, she couldn't help but ask herself, "How would my neighbors feel if they knew I had a gun?"

Moeinzadeh never had to show his gun the night he confronted a stranger on his back patio. He knows how dangerous that can be.

"If you're going to own a firearm," he said, "you better know how and when to use it."